The Art of Unlearning...
Unlearning >>> Learning
Something subtle has been changing in how we work.
Years of instincts — debugging everything ourselves, zero trust, planning every step — are no longer absolute.
AI is quietly resetting the boundaries of our thinking territories.
This piece is about that shift. What we need to let go of — and what we need to learn to adapt, to coexist.
We’ve mastered the art of holding on.
Careers. Opinions. Identities. Proof of who we are.
What no one teaches us is how to put any of it down.
And that turns out to be the harder skill.
We have been trained to learn.
Add skills. Add knowledge. Add layers.
But some problems don’t need more.
They need less.
That’s why I’m drawn to kids at gatherings of grown-ups.
Not because I enjoy the gatherings—I don’t.
But because they carry something we’ve quietly lost.
They are not trying to be anything.
They just are.
Like a limit in calculus—we approach that state endlessly, but never quite arrive.
They live there by default.
Unlearning has become a fashionable word.
Everyone agrees it matters.
Almost no one practices it.
Because unlearning is not an idea.
It is a deliberate unleash.
People often ask: how many jobs will AI take?
It’s the wrong question.
“How” is already solved.
Ask a model—it will tell you how to code, write, plan, build.
But what to build.
Why it matters.
When to act.
That still demands something else.
Context. Judgment. Weight.
AI can retrieve.
It still cannot decide what deserves to exist.
What & Why → still human
How → largely solved
Unlearning sits outside that frame.
It asks you to carry less.
I often think of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—
a miraculous machine that erases memory on demand.
But that’s mechanical.
It doesn’t understand the weight of what it removes.
Removing data doesn’t necessarily mean removing learnings! Some scars, some emotional ghost prints of those memories, can still hinder you.
A mischievous thought—
what if you wanted to erase your own bad memories? e.g. self-deallocation (?)
Learning demands effort—focus, discipline, consistency.
Unlearning demands something else.
To dissolve the ego built through all that learning.
To sit in not-knowing longer than comfort allows.
Unlearning is not intellectual.
It is emotional catharsis.
My teacher once told me:
If both your hands are holding laddoos,
how will you taste the basundi in front of you?
One hand has to empty.
That’s why kids feel like magicians.
They drop the laddoo without ceremony—
because they are absorbed in what’s in front of them.
We spend our adult lives trying to engineer that lightness back in.
Books. Retreats. Systems.
Kids don’t need a system.
They just let go.
Can AI unlearn?
No.
It can be trained. Retrained. Fine-tuned.
That’s accumulation.
Not release.
“Real unlearning offers no API!”
The real question is not what AI will take.
It’s this:
How often are you willing to become a beginner again?
To put down what you know.
To stand there—empty-handed—
without rushing to fill that void.
Because that space is where something new arrives.
Most people can never stay there long enough. Being deliberately clueless is so unsettling!!
The idea of letting go, is not new.
It’s ancient.
Hiding in plain sight.